A rookie firefighter’s view of a season on a Fire Use Module

Joshua Berman has written books about foreign travel and living in Belize and Nicaragua, but when he took a job on the Whiskeytown Fire Use Module in northern California in 2003 it must have seemed to him that he had entered a world as foreign as those central American countries. In an article he wrote for a travel web site, Worldhum, he exaggerates and uses inflammatory language to describe life on a Fire Use Module as seen through the eyes of a rookie. It is a little disturbing to see the job described this way, but judge for yourself. Here is the beginning of the article:

Joshua Berman spent a glorious summer exploring some of America’s most beautiful wilderness areas — with a drip torch in hand.

That summer, my job was to burn, to lay flame across the earth and watch some of America’s most remote and spectacular wildernesses go up in columns of black. It was beautiful.

“Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean,” wrote Ray Bradbury.

But instead of destroying books with flamethrowers, as the futuristic firemen of “Fahrenheit 451” did, our job was to burn forests. Mostly, we used drip torches—heavy, metal cans with crudely soldered handles. These were the tools of choice for manual ignition, clutched in leather gloves, diesel-mix sloshing inside. When the terrain didn’t favor torches—when the fuel (trees, brush, and grass) was patchy, or farther than arm’s length away—we had other methods. We dropped ping-pong balls of napalm from helicopters, set off small bombs in thickets of brush, and shot flaming disks from pistols.

As if none of this was fun enough, we were also mobile, making that fire season one of the most memorable (and lucrative) traveling summers of my life. I worked for the National Park Service, roaming from parkland to parkland, charting our success by numbers of acres burned and number of overtime and hazard-pay hours earned. Not much else mattered. The kicker was, for most wildland firefighters I knew, that money saved in fire season was money spent soon after—usually on travel—when our jobs ended in late fall.

But first, we burned. The idea was, the more land burned, the less fuel there was to go up later. In essence, we were fighting future fires by beating them to the punch. With each new record-setting blaze burning out of control on the nightly news, we learned that treating fire as an invasive, evil force instead of a restorative one, and trying to completely exclude it from our wildlands, was an unnatural, impossible, and ultimately disastrous approach.

On a related note:

–In 2008 the Whiskeytown Fire Use Module’s office was threatened by the Motion Fire when it burned into Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, but previous fuel treatments resulted in lower fire intensities near the structure, making it possible to conduct a safe and controlled burn-out.

–Someone calling himself “duckvariety” is trying to sell a “Whiskeytown Prescribed Fire Module” patch on Ebay. Is that legal? I know, for example, it is illegal to sell uniforms with the National Park Service patch.

Report released for escaped prescribed fire on Kaibab NF

The U. S. Forest Service has released an “Escaped Fire Review” for the Twin prescribed fire which escaped control on the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona on October 2, 2009. Wildfire Today reported on the incident. One of our articles received 15 comments.

Here is an excerpt from the review:

The Review Team found four causal factors contributing to the escape and conversion to wildfire. These four are:

  • Wind Direction Shift – An unforecasted wind direction change resulted in a decision to change ignition operations to prevent established fire from reaching the east control line without a black buffer to protect it. Spot fires that ultimately led to the escape occurred on the east side of the burn unit and presented greater difficulty for holding due to complex terrain and changing fuel types outside the unit.
  • Exceeding Relative Humidity Parameter in Prescription in Combination with Changing Wind Direction – Prescribed burning continued when actual relative humidity levels dropped below prescribed ranges, contributing to spot fire propagation and growth. It is not known if this situation alone would have caused escape of the prescribed fire – it did not in the other burn unit.
  • Fuel Type Differences Outside the Burn Unit – Fuel loading northeast of the burn unit changes significantly to a heavier fuel type increasing resistance to control.
  • Contingency Resource Identification in the Burn Plan – Contingency resources for this burn plan were calculated for fuel models and terrain inside the burn unit which differed significantly from terrain and fuels outside the burn unit. The resource capabilities were not adequate for the differing fuels and terrain.
  • Ensure compliance with policy and direction regarding prescribed burn planning and implementation.

Recommendations from the Review Team include:

  • Ensure compliance with policy and direction regarding prescribed burn planning and implementation.
  • Improve specificity and clarity of burn plans.
  • Complete detailed reconnaissance of burn units and surrounding area.
  • Verify weather forecasts and compare with prescription parameters.
  • Ensure position qualifications, task book requirements, and documentations are complete and meet requirements.
  • Increase integration and communication between resource areas to prevent conflicting management objectives.
Thanks Dick

Researchers: smoke promotes the germination of some seeds

We used to say “Wood smoke is good smoke”, when downplaying the negative aspects of putting smoke into the air during a prescribed fire. But apparently to some species that is literally the truth. Researchers have found that plant-derived smoke is a potent seed germination promoter for many species.

From an article in Science Daily:

Forest fire smoke. Photo by Bill Gabbert
Photo: Bill Gabbert

The innermost secrets of fire’s role in the rebirth and renewal of forests and grasslands are being revealed in research that has identified plant growth promoters and inhibitors in smoke. In the latest discovery about smoke’s secret life, an international team of scientists are reporting discovery of a plant growth inhibitor in smoke.

The study appears in ACS’s Journal of Natural Products.
“Smoke plays an intriguing role in promoting the germination of seeds of many species following a fire,” Johannes Van Staden and colleagues point out in the report. They previously discovered a chemical compound in smoke from burning plants that promotes seed germination. Such seeds, which remain in the undercover on forest and meadow floors after fires have been extinguished, are responsible for the surprisingly rapid regrowth of fire-devastated landscapes.

In their new research, the scientists report discovery of an inhibitor compound that may block the action of the stimulator, preventing germination of seeds. They suspect that the compounds may be part of a carefully crafted natural regulatory system for repopulating fire-ravaged landscapes. Interaction of these and other compounds may ensure that seeds remain dormant until environmental conditions are best for germination. The inhibitor thus may delay germination of seeds until moisture and temperature are right, and then take a back seat to the germination promoter in smoke.

The research was conducted at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the University of Stellenbosch, the University of Copenhagen,  and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

Thanks Stephen

Prescribed burning in Monmouth Battlefield State Park

I ran across some interesting videos of crews doing some prescribed burning in Monmouth Battlefield State Park in New Jersey. Apparently they have a pretty hot prescription for wind speed, and like some other firefighters in the East and South, ride on the back of fire trucks while applying water. All three videos were uploaded to YouTube on January 16, 2009.

(no longer available)

The description for all three videos is the same:

B10 crews of the NJ Forest Fire Service doing prescribed burning at Monmouth Battlefield State Park, Manalapan, NJ

Yosemite National Park fire videos

The National Park Service has produced two excellent videos about fire management in Yosemite National Park in California. They are professional quality and rival any of the slick productions you see on broadcast television.

One is titled Best Intentions and gives an overall view of prescribed fire in the park. It is supposed to be 26 minutes long, but while watching it on the park’s web site it abruptly stopped at the 15 minute mark, in the middle of Fuels Specialist Mike Beasley’s interview, which is a shame because Mike is a former co-worker and I was looking forward to seeing his presentation. It is possible to download the entire 48 MB Quicktime video and watch it on your own computer, which would be a work-around for the 15-minute cutoff.

Frame from Best Intentions, NPS video
Frame from Best Intentions, NPS video

The other video is called Restoring a Meadow and is 7 minutes long. It is about removing non-native blackberry and the use of prescribed fire as one of the tools to accomplish that objective.  The most interesting part of the video is how they ignite the prescribed fire without using any matches, fusees, accelerants, or drip torches.

Frame from Restoring a Meadow, NPS video
Frame from Restoring a Meadow, NPS video

Quote of the day

In explaining to a reporter why the Everglades National Park is conducting a 1,500-acre prescribed fire, Rick Anderson, the park’s Fire Management Officer, said in part:

“If we don’t burn it when we can control it, it will burn when we can’t.”

Well said.

File photo of a prescribed fire in Everglades National Park. NPS photo.
File photo of a prescribed fire in Everglades National Park. NPS photo.

Researchers: "Ethnicity does matter when it comes to prescribed fire"

Researchers from the USDA’s Southern Research Station (SRS) concluded in a study that a person’s ethnicity and culture may affect their perceptions of prescribed fire. Here is an excerpt from a summary of their report:

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SRS researchers Mike Bowker, Cassandra Johnson, and Ken Cordell, along with university collaborators Siew Lim, Gary Green, and Sandra Rideout-Hanzak (former SRS scientist) used data from a recent version of the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment to look at how culture affects perceptions and attitudes about fire and fire management in the South. When they analyzed the results, they found definite variations among respondents from the three most prominent ethnic groups in the South—African- Americans, Hispanics, and whites— about prescribed fire and its effects.

“The purpose of the southwide survey was to provide policymakers with a broad picture of public opinion on prescribed fire among major ethnic groups in the Southern United States,” says Bowker, SRS research social scientist based in Athens, GA. “The goal is to enhance agency communications with the public and to gain acceptance of prescribed fire as a fuel control program.”

Though overall most survey respondents agreed that public land managers and forest professionals can be trusted to choose the best methods for dealing with fire, African- American and Hispanic agreement was lower. African-Americans and Hispanics were also less likely to support prescribed fire as a management tool, and were more concerned about fire effects—harm to wildlife, reduced scenic quality, and smoke—than whites. Females across all groups also tended to be more concerned about the effects of prescribed fire than males. In addition, although level of education had no effect on preference for prescribed fire in general, concern over side effects diminished as education increased.

“Though we found that concern over the side effects of prescribed fire diminished as education level increased, it doesn’t mean that more education leads to environmental knowledge,” cautions Bowker. “The whole correlation between education and environmental knowledge needs to be more carefully examined.”

One reason for differences among groups may have to do with ethnic environmental beliefs and backgrounds, an area that social environmental science has only started to explore. Another factor uncovered in the survey was local private forest land coverage. According to the survey data, as the presence of private forest land increases in the area a respondent lives in, so does distrust in the use of fire as a management tool. This result may indicate a lack of confidence in the expertise of private land owners or managers, distrust of state liability laws, or a lack of communication between residents and private land managers.

“Our statistical evidence suggests that ethnicity does matter when it comes to prescribed fire,” says Bowker. “To gain wide public support and trust, land managers and owners should be aware of these differences, and fuel control programs should be tailored with the concerns and preferences of the local community in mind.”

 

via @fireinfogirl

Looking back at two escaped prescribed fires on Okanogan-Wenatchee NF

The Wenatchee World has an article that reviews two prescribed fires that escaped control on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington earlier this month, the Beehive and the Preston-Fox fires. Here is an excerpt.

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WENATCHEE In early October, when it seemed wildfire season had come to a close, two fires on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest burned out of control.

Intentionally ignited by the U.S. Forest Service as prescribed fires, parts of the Beehive Reservoir Fire southwest of Wenatchee, and the Preston-Fox Fire west of Entiat became uncontrolled wildfires. The agency called in helicopters, hotshot crews and other resources to get the fires under control.

The Forest Service is conducting more and larger controlled burns throughout the Pacific Northwest. In 2002 it burned a total of 34,300 acres in Washington and Oregon, and that figure had more than doubled to about 82,500 acres this year, said regional Forest Service spokesman Tom Knappenberger.

And with more acres to burn, and only short windows in the spring and fall to burn them, fire officials say it’s not a surprise that some of the fires get away.

“You can’t have large prescribed fires without expecting to lose a fire here and there,” said Bobbie Scopa, fire management officer for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.

She said the Forest Service is trying to burn more acres without spending more money and the only way to do that is to burn larger units.

“If you think about the forest being 3.8 million acres, and say we were burning 10,000 to 15,000 acres a year, we’re not going to make a big enough impact on the forest by doing that,” she said. “We’re trying to increase the size of our projects so we can make a difference.”

Forest spokeswoman Robin DeMario said it’s tough to determine exactly how much money the Forest Service spent to suppress these fires beyond what the agency was already spending to under-burn the areas.

Only about 45 acres of the 600 acres burned in Beehive, and about 100 acres of 1,400 acres burned in the Preston-Fox were not slated for prescribed fire, she said.

The cost of fighting those fires ranged from $600 to $800 per acre, compared with about $30 it costs to conduct a controlled burn, DeMario said.

“We try to be good stewards of the land. And we try to be cost-conscious with American tax dollars, which is why we try to do prescribed burning. It costs a lot less,” she said.

No homes were threatened by either blaze, but the Beehive fire did burn about 40 acres of Longview Timber Corp. property.

Company representative Steve Tift said much of the fire stayed on the ground, but climbed into some trees which now have orange needles. He said he won’t know until next spring if the trees will survive. “We hate to lose any timber,” he said. But added, “Fire in Eastern Washington is just part of life.”
The Preston-Fox Fire burned about 85 acres of the Entiat Experimental Forest, where Forest Service researchers are conducting ongoing studies. That 1,290-acre fire started as a 10-acre test plot that escaped.

Winds pushed both fires out of control.

Scopa said the Forest Service does all it can to get an accurate weather forecast, but the weather doesn’t always do what’s expected.

“We take weather readings on the site for a few days prior to when we’re burning,” she said. The readings include things like fuel moisture and humidity along with winds speed, wind direction, temperature and other factors. The information is sent to the National Weather Service in Spokane, which comes up with a forecast for the specific site before the controlled burn is ignited, Scopa said.

“Is it foolproof, every time you ignite a burn? No, it isn’t,” she said. “This is not an exact science.”
Scopa said it’s never a good thing to lose control of a prescribed burn, but in both fires, the blaze that escaped acted more like a controlled burn than a wildfire — burning out the understory without burning up into the crowns of trees, thereby leaving the larger, older trees in a healthier ecosystem.

“We’re not happy we weren’t able to keep it inside the line, but the area that burned outside the line was just as beneficial, from a resource-benefit standpoint,” she said.

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More information about the Preston-Fox fire can be found HERE.

The Baker River Hotshots Tweeted about both fires in early October.